Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday July 23, 2009 @05:51PM
from the comes-with-free-offsite-backups dept.

An anonymous reader writes "SpinVox offers to convert voice messages to text using a system called D2 or 'the Brain.' According to BBC News, said 'Brain' is often of the old-fashioned kind: SpinVox is sending private voice messages to South Africa, the Philippines, and maybe Egypt to be typed by people in a call centre, despite being registered as keeping all private data inside Europe and claiming that the text is somehow anonymised. Insiders say they transcribed 'love messages, secret messages' and everything else from beginning to end, and the company is being bled dry by the cost: SpinVox has been locked out of one of their data centers over a payment dispute. SpinVox refuses to comment further on details — but according to their web page, they're 'enabling the Speech 3.0, Voice 3.0, and Business 3.0 markets,' whatever that means."

He's probably referring to the frequency with which vowels appear in any given word. Yes, Japanese has only 5 vowels, but because almost all syllables in the language are simple (1 consonant)(1 vowel) pairs, almost every other letter in a written word is a vowel.

Actually that's a poor comparison. English spelling is different from Japanese in that there are lots of unpronounced letters, as well as single sounds spelled with multiple letters. What if we redo that with a more phonetic respelling* (imagine "hard" vowel pronunciation).

I do admit, I had to look them up. Also, I can see how the use of those sentences is a wee bit limited to very special occasions (read: they're fabricated and don't really have any sensible application). But they show that you can indeed form whole sentences without using a single vowel.

We're already on Bubble 4.0. The first bubble was Goldman Sachs orchestration of the dot-com bubble (selling worthless websites to stock market speculators). The second was the mortgage bubble. Then Goldman Sachs orchestrated the oil bubble of 2008, and now they're creating another bubble built on money borrowed from China (aka the bailout bubble) which is not real production, but fiat.

That's 4.

So invest now in the market. Thanks to Goldman and their buds in the treasury/central bank (former GS employe

When we repealed the (very good) legislation enacted in response to the Great Depression, we restore to market to its natural boom-bust cycle. We'll keep going through these periods until we restore the safeguards that our great-grandparents wisely created. Even without the dubious benefits of computer models and Chicago economics, these people gave us 50 years of prosperity that we've managed to wreck in a decade. Shouldn't we stop arrogantly assuming that they were wrong, we are right, and accept that we might need regulation after all?

The real problem is that people have lost their heads in the United States. The return of evangelicals has led to an atmosphere that is literally opposed to science. So, you get exactly what you expect. Opinions that are based on anecdote and wish thinking instead of data. The reason science works is because you start with the assumption that you don't know something until you can prove that you probably know it, with repeatable, verifiable results. When you start trusting the word of pill junkies [rushlimbaugh.com] and homophobic college dropouts [hannity.com] versus the entire scientific community and their reams of data, get ready for some wide-reaching and catastrophic fuckups.

Canada kept the rules. The Canadian banking system is still the most sound. Every time we take cops off the financial beat, we end up with a banking crisis. These realities can be arrived at by simply reading about the last 30 years of panics, and the hundred years of bank panics that existed before the FDIC and sensible Great Depression legislation.

Canada kept the rules. The Canadian banking system is still the most sound.

Think about what does a "sound banking system" actually means. It means that old money stays that way. It means that generation after generation, the same banks gain more and more power and get to call more and more of the agenda. Stable banking systems are good for people who are already wealthy and powerful. Wiping out unwisely invested wealth punishes the greedy and gives the have-nots a new opportunity.

The problem is when we have this regulation, but other countries don't. It is all part of living in a global economy. If you hobble your own companies, then global companies grow bigger and the dominate.

So Speech 3.0 provides 150 meters of service-level agreements with no experience-point cap.

Voice 3.0: Superior and proven range of voice products. We repeatedly deliver great, mass-market experiences with our expertise in marketing and management of all lifecycle stages.

Voice 3.0 takes you from larva, through pupa, all the way to butterfly, and then you die and get eaten.

Business 3.0: Mature yet flexible business models - designed to adapt to the dynamics of service brands we partner with, from on-demand to full lifecycle revenue strategies

Business 3.0 is apparently a flexible business model where they interact with their partners. So that's new I guess, no one has thought of that yet. It's also where people who write marketing buzzwords go to die.

The speeck recognition people have broken their promises for several decades now. Using humans is still the only working speaker-independent way to do it.

What I find surprising is that it is apparently not cost effective. Here is an alternate approach: Have people transcribe it, but let them look at "pictures" as reward. Seems to be working well in breaking catchpas, so why not for this?

Well, apparently they're disgruntled because allegedly they're getting private medical treatment denied because the premium's are not being paid, and they've been asked to salary for 2 months not as cash, but as share options.

That's akin to saying someone who said he didn't kill someone could be due for murder AND contempt. Do you really care they care for the minuscle transgression if they're found guilty of the grave crime?

I have had to work with UK privacy laws before, and trust me, violating them [ed.ac.uk] is nothing like murder (see point #1 in the link). It's more like a slap on the wrists and a small fine. Lying and prolonging the media coverage, OTOH, means more customers get to find out that you're lying scumbags.

Which is why IMHO Spinvox is indeed innocent (and is the victim of disgruntled employees) or an especially brazen scumbag.

That's nothing, I just bought an application that converts my speech to text. Read that back to me. I said, read that back to me. God damn it, what the hell is wrong with this thing. Stupid blinking light, what the hell is that supposed to mean? This is... oh here we go. No, don't send

They could go a step further, using the strategy used to crack captchas [boingboing.net], putting humans to "solve" the problem of telling what is being said in a sound file to be able to access the next part of a porn image or another kind of non economical incentive. Don't have to be the full message, just parts between pauses or things like that

Human transcription performed on industrial scale by non-native speakers is nothing new. For example, medical imaging texts are typed up by Cheap Foreign Labour from voice messages recorded by doctors.So remember this next time you read the analysis of your expensive MRI test.;)

You must not have worked with Indians before, they are just as good if not better then most American Workers, today.Especially if you have a good management team who can talk the language and know the culture. Sure you will come up a couple of bad eggs or some horror stories. But really you can get those same stories from any group of people. However I find them in general to be very motivated workers and rather quite intelligent and willing to learn new things. They became the american ideal while we have gotten fat lazy and feeling entitled.

The Robot will not do the job perfectly, hence the completive advantage of SpinBox humans can translate human speech better then a computer can. Robots have a lot of hidden costs as well. You change your process you need a full set of new robots and technology. Or you spend a lot of money for more general use robots which preform slower.

The cost of outsourcing isn't as cheap as saying well and American gets paid $25 an hour while an Indian gets paid $5 so it is 5 times cheaper working with India. There is extra management of working with people in different areas and other costs however this is a management issue which can be optimized to work.

I am sure if the work was being outsourced to a country were people speak the same language and look and have a similar culture to us and lighter skin, then there would be less of an outrage. You may deny that fact, and you may believe your denial. However I bet if you honestly looked in yourself you will realize most of the outrage with Indian workers is that they are not you race of people.

Outsourcing to India has many benefits besides cost being halfway around the world allows 24 hour operations. In essence doubling your output. And they are hard workers who do good quality work. Now if your management is stupid then you may get bad results but that is true anywhere.

There are some fucking idiots in India too but really the quality is about the same as the states per individual and a crap shoot on a company that has no track record. I've had good experience in India too and I'm Buddhist so I greatly respect the Indian culture and peoples, but when I've had a bad experience in India it was like getting skullfucked with a hot poker, mostly because the Indians were far more racist than anyone on my team back in the states and talked to us like we were fucking children, li

You are missing the point. Bender stays in the EU, so he's bound by the laws of the EU. Moreover, it's not probable for Bender to go off and steal your data. Okay, he might accidentally burp it all up. But he wouldn't go use the information to extort you. (Well, he would. But I mean a computer wouldn't.) Apu might go and Nigerian spam your ass using the information you were lead to believe was kept highly confidential.

Also, the idea of having a robot transcribe your love messages is far more acceptable to m

Also, the idea of having a robot transcribe your love messages is far more acceptable to many than having a guy listen to your deepest thoughts and giggling while doing so. Who knows? He might even put a few jokes in there.

Heck, you can just see it...that's movie material right there.

Spinvox employee #1 to Spinvox employee #2: "Oh man, will you look at this? How is this guy ever expecting to get laid when this is how he tries to woo a woman?"

If I can't understand a Geordie, let alone a god damn American, how the fuck will a computer, I doubt the Africans/Asians (who despite above claims probably speak the queens English a damn sight better than most of you guys (assuming slashdot is populated by gorram Americans)) will get it spot on, but their internal algorithms have had a data set of at least 18 years to train on, this beats any automated system!. Voice recognition* has its places (e.g the iPhone does it right), but transcription is not one

A theme in the film is Virtual Labor - robots of the future will really be remotely operated by cheap overseas labor. SpinVox is doing similar kind of things, but unlike Mechanical Turk has the factore of outsourcing to the low-wage regions.

I've been wondering about "image ATMs", which accept checks for deposit, imaging them. I've had one correctly accept a check with the amount handwritten in cursive. I suspect that at least the hard cases are being referred to humans for recognition.

I've used SpinVox for years at it was pretty obvious to me that it was a person doing the work - it was far too good. Friends went through a stage of sending increasingly bizarre messages to see if I would get something sensible and I generally did.

And now you're saying that people who barely speak or understand English, let alone the subtlties of the language, being paid to transcribe English, is 'technically sound' and 'the best way to do it'?...

Frankly, I'm not sure anymore if you're serious, or just being sarcastic.

Next you'll probably tell me "Oh, see that motherboard made of flammable wood? Regardless of it's flammability, it's the best flame-proof way to make a motherboard."

Sadly, it is. Many schools, even in third world and fourth world nations, teach English as their second language for people to participate in business with other groups, even other cultures within their same nations. English _is_ the trade language for this era. And compared to the absolute nonsensical debris most speech algorithms generate in poor acoustic environments, human brains designed by evolution and by education to tease speech out of background environments remain the best speech recognition tool.

Sure, mod points come and go. It's just not often I see things change so quickly. I would hope, though, that they aren't modding me down simply based on differing opinion.

I considered Mr Mista troll-like because of the pattern of constructing strawmen from my points, followed by completely unrelated rhetorical baiting. I could be wrong - he might be earnest; wouldn't be the first time someone was wrong on the internet.

And now you're saying that people who barely speak or understand English, let alone the subtlties of the language, being paid to transcribe English, is 'technically sound' and 'the best way to do it'?...

I think it's more likely that these people speak better, more grammatically correct English than the average Brit or American.

I find it likely that the majority of these people who worked in these centers are young, recent college/university graduates who are doing this because they couldn't find another well paying job. This isn't a bunch of Angolans or Indonesians. We're talking about South Africans and Filipinos. The well educated South African and Filipino speaks, reads and writes excellent English.

For that matter, the same is probably true of Egyptians. Though I can't say that with any certainty because I don't know too many Egyptians.

Nobody has a funny accent when they type. Other than the accent and occasional odd phrasing (which would never come out in a transcription service - english to english is pretty frickin easy), most of these people speak excellent English, particularly since it is a second language for all of them.

Hell, my last college english class was taught by an Indian immigrant. She had a heavy accent, but her English was very precise and correct. The only annoying thing was she liked the word "rubric", and rolled he

"Able to speak grammatically correct ${LANGUAGE} when in a classroom environment, there's little background noise and everything is being enunciated nice and slowly" is a thousand times removed from "Able to hold a conversation in ${LANGUAGE} as well as any native ${LANGUAGE} speaker".

A computer does not care what he translates. It doesn't 'read' (or 'listen to') your message. It picks it apart logically on semantics and assembles a message in another language based on this.

Humans read, understand, translate and write. And the 'understand' part is the one with the security and confidentality issue. And don't tell me "they're some dumb idiots in Backwater Nowhere, they don't understand what's written and they don't care". Says

It may be they lied about keeping user supplied data in house, and they may have implied that they used advanced technological means to do the transcription, but if their service does what it says I can't blame them for using human labour to do the transcription.

I don't know... an unethical service, an unscrupulous company, a management with the lack of business sense to realize this is a public relations disaster, a fiscally untenable platform, and (possibly) opens them up to legal action... I'd call that crazy.

Sure, the technology works, but the whole idea is preposterous. Who transcribes the workers' voice mail? Or is voice mail transcription reserved for the upper class? Surely it's not such an elite service to warrant that treatment, which indicates tha

>>>Human brains remain the only high performance computer manufactured with unskilled labour.

I object! It takes a lot of skill to satisfy today's demanding women. And what happens if you lack that skill? They'll just jump ship to some other guy's bed. Unskilled labor indeed. It takes a lot of skill to convince Miss Prissy to let her guard down, bribe her with a 50,000 dollar wedding, remove the diaphragm, and let you impregnate her.

No I'm not bitter.

Although I do have this gnawing pain in my gut until I can taste the bile rising up my throat and into my mouth. Well. Maybe I'm a little bitter. Or else I just have heartburn; anybody have a TicTac?

Ok, snide and tasteless comments aside. The only thing it takes a lot of is time. Women can get quite desperate when they hear their biological clock tick away. Unfortunately that happens after their best before date...

From a purely evolutionary point of view? We're quite sane, if you ask me. If the idea of impregnating your woman gives you a boner, I'd say it's about as close to the original idea behind sex as it can be.

Don't tell anyone but, hey, getting her pregnant was the idea behind fucking. I know, it kinda changed in the meantime, but originally, that was the plan.

One of my first jobs was for a company that scanned medical records and had computers read the text. Or, at least, that was how they advertised it.
Actually it was me and about 100 other people reading the medical records and typing them in...

It may be they lied about keeping user supplied data in house, and they may have implied that they used advanced technological means to do the transcription, but if their service does what it says I can't blame them for using human labour to do the transcription.

Controlling who has access to the private messages in a particular way is part of what they said they would do for the people using the service, so, no, if they said they were doing automated transcription and keeping all personal data inside Europe